


Rage Against the Dying of the Light

by orphan_account



Category: Interstellar (2014), Tenet (2020)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Interstellar, Angst with a Happy Ending, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, NASA References, Neil POV, Pack Family, Space Colonization, Space Flight
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:07:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26628025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The year was 2067. And humanity has virtually lost all of their imagination and backbone, their will to survive long shot down the tubes.Humanity was born on Earth, but it was never meant to die here.
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	Rage Against the Dying of the Light

**CHAPTER 1 - THE GHOST OF OUR CHILDREN'S FUTURE**

*****

_**"Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it."** _

_**-**_ Dr. Brand, _Interstellar_

* * *

Earth was dying.

Everyone else seemed to be aware of it. How could they not be, when news coverage of crop shortages are practically the headlines worth listening to everyday. A large rift has wedged itself between socioeconomic classes, further driving them apart from bridging the key to universal peace. College was no longer accessible. Your future was determined by your ability to grow crops and keep them from dying.

The year was 2067. And humanity has just collectively decided to buckle down and wait, until it was time for the rest of them to expire, just like cans of beans and chicken soup that used to overflow the shelves of grocery stores.

There wasn’t even that privilege anymore. There might’ve been one, once upon a lifetime ago. Who knows? He hardly remembers anything before the age of storms and crop shortages. But now, everyone was just waiting for the proverbial guillotine to come down and sever humanity’s few threads still clinging to bare life.

The year was 2067. And humanity has virtually lost all of their imagination and backbone, their will to survive long shot down the tubes.

The year was 2067. And he was a lone omega raising one child, a young Alpha girl. He was alone, and not a day goes by that he doesn’t regret following his mate to the stars. It has been almost ten years, and he still deeply regrets how they parted on sour terms.

He was a lone omega raising one beautiful girl, but he shouldn’t be doing this alone. It’s been almost a decade, but he still looks at the stars and galaxies beyond the cosmic backyard they called home, carrying idle conversations with some ghost halfway across known space, who was probably dead already. Still, he dare to hope, even if it was a fragile and brittle kind of hope. He can’t help it, for he is but a human.

“Amelia! Amelia!” he called out, hearing his own voice echo around the house.

“I’m not going to be late, Dad! Seriously!” she called out, a muffled shout of exasperation that he could barely hear from the second floor.

“Your breakfast is going cold, love!” he shouts back, shaking his head in exasperation.

“I’m coming down in a minute! Stop rushing me! Geez!”

He exhales sharply, shaking his head again. He stops packing away her lunchbox and takes a moment to stare at the framed photograph mounted on the pale dusty wall of the small kitchen. 

“I can’t do this alone,” he confesses softly for the hundredth time today. He shuts his eyes and inhales sharply. “I wish you didn’t leave. I wish I never made you want to leave.”

He opens his eyes again, giving a bittersweet smile to the photo, which was but a pale imitation of the emotional vibrancy of a significant moment in their lives. “But who was I to change who you were? Even I couldn’t stop you. I don’t think you would’ve let me.”

He flinches when he hears a sharp thud echoing from his daughter’s room.

“Pa! You should see this! Come here!” Amelia shrieked excitedly.

He shakes his head, failing to stop the fond grin on his face. “The ghost again,” he murmurs.

“It’s the ghost! He’s talking to me again!” Amelia shrieked, and he winced as he heard her jumping up and down in excitement, causing the floorboards to creak ominously. “Dad! Come up now!”

He sighs. “Alright! I’m coming up!”

* * *

He stares at the pile of books scattered across Amelia’s bedroom. He raises an eyebrow, looking at Amelia’s excited demeanor. His daughter just grins back at him, and for a moment, he feels a pang of wistfulness when he sees just how uncannily similar her smile was to his mate’s own smile. He shakes it off, swallowing hard against the rising tide of melancholy flooding his chest.

Amelia grins, manically waving her tiny notebook in the air, as if it could provide a good summary of what she discovered. “The ghost left us a message again! I figured it out, Pa! I figured it out!”

_She is so much like you, John. You have no idea. She’s got your determination, alright._

He exhales slowly, taking a careful step forward to walk towards the edge of her bed. He gently sits down at the edge of the mattress. He feels the bed dipping as his daughter hastily crawls over to sit down by his side. He smiles softly as she frantically flips through numerous pages, before landing on the one containing her most recent work.

**‘STAY’**

He scowls at the word. “’Stay’? That is what your ghost said?”

Amelia nods eagerly, her eyes wide and shining with enthusiasm. “Uh huh! The ghost said ‘stay’! But I don’t know what that really means. What does the ghost want us to stay from?”

A memory flashes before his eyes.

_“You are being selfish, John,” he remembered saying, close to a decade earlier. He remembered how he looked exactly. He was standing on the very same small kitchen, glaring at his alpha mate with a scorching kind of anger that was enough to melt glaciers. “We have a daughter on the way. And you’re telling me you volunteered for the Lazarus missions? Did - did you not think about me? Did you not think of the daughter you’re never going to see if you leave us on this dustball of a planet? Did we ever even come up on your radar of things to consider?”_

_John clenches his jaw, and it was already with a sinking heart that he realizes that his mate chose their path, his daughter’s future, before he had any chance to give his input. “I’m doing this for you, for our daughter. Think about it, Neil. We are the last generation that will ever be lucky to call the Earth home. But after that --”_

_“Oh, so it just slipped your mind, didn’t it? It just sort of, I don’t know, slipped your mind to somehow mention it to me that you’ve probably been thinking about this for weeks?” he snapped back. “Fucking hell, John! You’ve been away for more than ten hours everyday since the last few months, right when I needed you most! And then, you just up and tell me that you’re going to leave on some mission off-planet, goodness knows where and for how long? Right, that does sound like the epitome of responsibility for me!”_

_John shuts his eyes, sighing in that predictable manner that he knows so well, right before his mate is about to launch into another one of his tirades that would justify his decision. “You don’t understand. The Earth will not survive by the time our daughter is in her prime. She and her generation will waste away here, on a dying planet. And for what? So that she could fight over what little food and water remains? I don’t want that her to live that kind of life. And neither do you. I know you wouldn’t want that for her.”_

_He looks back at him, staring. Suddenly, he feels something giving away in his chest and it was with rising dread that he feels his heart tearing itself apart. He curls his upper lip, blinking hard and fast to try and stop the tears that wanted to unleash themselves. He swallows hard. But try as he might to appear strong, the hard edge in his mate’s eyes fades away. He breaks eye contact, looking down at the ground._

_He curls his lip again, forcing himself to stare harshly at his mate, even if it only breaks his heart further to do so. “At least I can say that I was there for her when she will need it the most. At least she won’t have to cry at the fact that she had no one to care for her, to raise her.”_

_John reels back, eyes wide and deeply pained. His jaw is slightly agape, as if he suddenly felt the need to gasp for breath. A part of him wanted to stop, to stop hurting his mate, but months of emotional turmoil suddenly announced their need to find an outlet._

_He continued, ruthlessly. “You’ve always been the one to chase after grandiosity, John. Not me. Not anyone else. I fell in love with you, because you are a visionary and dreamer,” he swallowed hard. “And I still do. But, I never thought I would see the day where you would choose that over me and your daughter.”_

_He looks at his alpha again, and his heart breaks even more to see the wet sheen in John’s breathtaking eyes. “I needed you, John. I needed you, right here and now. I - I thought we were going to start a family together,” he said hoarsely, “but it turns out, I don’t know anymore. If you really cared, you would’ve told me. You had months to tell me. You wouldn’t have saddled me with this news, at the very last minute. If you really cared about us.”_

_John swallows hard, eyes brimming with unshed tears. “Neil, I didn’t even know --”_

_He snarls at his alpha, breaths uneven as his entire body shakes with the full force of the agony and betrayal that he is trying to hold at bay. “I don’t need to hear your excuses,” he hissed, voice cracking, “Go. Go! Do whatever you want. I’ll raise her by myself.”_

_He doesn’t look when John, his heart, his life, leaves the porch without so much as a goodbye._

He inhales sharply, shaking himself wildly out of a reverie. When he returns to the present, he finds himself pinned to the spot by his daughter’s sharp, observant gaze. 

For a brief moment, he remembered how John would get the very same look when his alpha was tinkering with one of the old farm tractors in their barn. He remembered John coming up the front porch, stained with oil and smelling of old diesel fuel. He could still clearly see that devastatingly handsome grin, and he still remembers the searing warmth of his mate’s fingers when they would gently encircle his hips, before pulling him close.

For the thousandth time in that very same day, he feels his heart shattering a little more.

_I miss you with every breath. I wish I could tell you to stay. I wish I never sent you away._

Amelia quiets down, looking up at him with that critical eye that she inherited from her father. “You never tell me much about Papa, Dad,” she said quietly. “Did he die? Is that why you’re sad all the time? Do you miss him?”

He swallows the lump that suddenly formed at the back of his throat. He blinks hard a few times, inhaling sharply at the lance of phantom pain piercing his chest. He cranes his neck to look down at her, the beautiful miracle that she is.

“I do. I miss him,” he said softly, giving her a smile that looks shaky and shattered as he feels inside. His daughter just looks at him, puzzled and curious all the same. “I miss him. So, much. To be honest, I don’t know if he’s dead.”

She looks down at her hands, fidgeting and playing with her pencil. He swallows and shuts his eyes again, feeling another lance of pain as he recognizes one of John’s nervous tics in his own daughter. 

“Why did Papa go away?” she asks quietly.

This was the question he dreaded the most.

He shuts his eyes as he lowered his chin to his chest. “Papa had to - he had to go somewhere far away and do something very important,” he replied softly.

“Will he ever come back?”

He feels the air knocked out of him. “I don’t know, love. I don’t know.”

He opens his eyes in shock when he feels her arms tightening around his waist. “I believe that Papa is still out there, Dad. I don’t think he’s dead. I think he’s still out there. I think he wanted to go home, but maybe he’s stuck?”

He feels his heart squeezing when she gazes up at him with a small smile. “I believe Papa’s still alive, Dad. I believe he’s trying to find a way back to us.”

_Goodness. Is there nothing from you that she didn’t inherit, John? She’s so much like you. It hurts to see you in her, when you’re not there anymore._

“I want to believe it, love. I really do,” he says quietly. “But --”

Amelia scrunches her nose. “Dad! Stop moping around! Papa is still alive! I believe he is alive!”

He exhales sharply, shaking his head. He smiles sadly. “I wish I had your optimism. Never change, alright? Never change. Not for me. Not for the world.”

He leans closer, drawing his arms around her. Amelia shrieks in delight and burrows deeper into his side, still giggling. He lays his cheek gently on the top of her head, shutting his eyes. He swallows hard as he turns his head to burrow into the soft curls of her black hair.

“I love you so much, little bear,” he says gently, voice cracking, “Your Papa loves you too, wherever he is. We both love you, so, so much.”

* * *

_ Do not go gentle into that good night, _  
_ Old age should burn and rave at close of day; _  
_ Rage, rage against the dying of the light. _  
  
_ Though wise men at their end know dark is right, _  
_ Because their words had forked no lightning they _  
_ Do not go gentle into that good night. _  
  
_ Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright _  
_ Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, _  
_ Rage, rage against the dying of the light. _  
  
_ Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, _  
_ And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, _  
_ Do not go gentle into that good night. _  
  
_ Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight _  
_ Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, _  
_ Rage, rage against the dying of the light. _  
  
_ And you, my father, there on the sad height, _  
_ Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. _  
_ Do not go gentle into that good night. _  
_ Rage, rage against the dying of the light. _


End file.
